EVENTS

The democracy scam

Today is election day in the US. Cartoonist Jen Sorensen describes that it is all part of a diabolical plot that was hatched a long time ago and seems to be working the way its evil originators intended.

Incidentally, although the government seems to have bungled the roll out of the Affordable care Act sign up, I suspect that since it is a technical issue, it will get resolved at some point in the near future, despite all the yelling and screaming currently going on. So I have not been particularly exercised over it. What I am more interested in is how people who enroll in it will think about it a year from now.

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As the victories of the teabaggers in 2010 proved, elections have consequences. The gerrymandering that took place because of Rethuglican victories have made it impossible for anything even looking like progressive legislation to pass the US House of Representatives. Even the Singhams of the world would have to admit that the travesties that took place last month would not have happened if Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House rather then John Boehner.

Well, and further, it doesn’t actually come into effect, the next bit, until January. So the usual lump of people will wait until somewhere around the morning of December 30th, before suddenly realizing that they’d better get this shit rolling soon.

The people who’ve been having trouble so far will be the early adopters. If they can get the federal exchange working well by December, the program will have no trouble meeting its goals. It’s a no-brainer: to a good number of the people who need to consider it most, the program means MUCH LOWER HEALTH CARE COSTS. For a lot of them, it means HAVING HEALTH CARE AT ALL, w00t. There’s no way that people are going to avoid the chance to save literally hundreds of dollars a month and get viable health care in the bargain, not in any kind of number that will doom it. My clear bet is that by March 15, the program is basically nukeproof.

As a software developer for an insurance/health care company, I wouldn’t bet on healthcare.gov being reasonably bug-free any time soon. I’ve done some small scale systems integrations that have taken development teams a year to complete. Systems among insurance providers are so disparate (even systems within the same company) that trying to find a way to integrate them into a unified comparison shopping experience is like trying to integrate a hammer and a potato. It’s not a few month job. It’s a few year job.

I feel deeply sorry for the developers on this. They’re dealing with an impossibly complex problem while the whole nation watches over their shoulder asking ignorant questions like, “How hard is it just to build a website?”